-Ed
SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2009, Issue No. 51
June 10, 2009
Secrecy News Blog:
http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/
[...]
A NEW HISTORY OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY
"The Secret Sentry" by Matthew Aid is a comprehensive new history of the
National Security Agency, from its origins in World War II through its Cold
War successes, failures and scandals up until the present.
Aid, an independent historian who is also a visiting fellow at the National
Security Archive, has synthesized a tremendous amount of research into a
narrative that is highly readable and sometimes gripping. All of the
familiar stops are there, including the Truman memo of 1952 that established
the Agency, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, KAL 007, 9/11 and on to today.
But the book also includes quite a bit of unfamiliar historical material,
and almost any reader is likely to discover something new and interesting.
I learned, for example, that a few months after seizing the USS Pueblo in
1968, North Korea published a book in French containing the full text of
many captured NSA documents, some of which, Mr. Aid says, are still
considered to be classified today (p. 142).
What will make The Secret Sentry indispensable to researchers are its nearly
one hundred pages of endnotes, which constitute a unique finding aid to the
most current archival releases, internal agency histories, and other
valuable records. Some of the documents gathered by Mr. Aid in the course
of his decades of research later vanished from public stacks at the National
Archives, prompting him to realize that some government agencies were
silently -- and often improperly -- reclassifying declassified records.
Portions of those now inaccessible records have been integrated into this
new history.
Inevitably, the book contains some minor errors. Mr. Aid repeats an
assertion by the 9/11 Commission that Osama bin Laden was alerted to NSA
monitoring of his satellite phone as the result of a 1998 news story that
appeared in the Washington Times (p. 383, note 69). But he neglects to note
that this assertion has been effectively refuted. (See, e.g., "File the Bin
Laden Phone Leak Under 'Urban Myths'" by Glenn Kessler, Washington Post,
December 22, 2005.)
The author is generous in his citations to the leading authors in the
intelligence field, from David Wise and David Kahn to Seymour Hersh and
Jeffrey Richelson and other less celebrated writers -- with one strange and
disconcerting exception. There is not a single reference in the entire book
to James Bamford, whose 1983 book The Puzzle Palace, among others, blazed
the trail that The Secret Sentry follows. Perhaps Mr. Aid felt it was
necessary to ignore Mr. Bamford so as not to be constantly agreeing or
disagreeing with him, and confirming or disputing his accounts. If that is
the case, he ought to have said so.
The Secret Sentry is being published this week by Bloomsbury Press.
http://www.bloomsburypress.com/books/catalog/the_secret_sentry
_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation
of American Scientists.
The Secrecy News Blog is at:
http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/
Received on Sat Mar 02 2024 - 00:57:28 CST